Hiroo Onoda and You

Once upon a time, there was a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda who was sent to the island of Lubang, near the Philippines, during WWII. In February 1945, the Allies arrived and Onoda and the other guerrilla soldiers split up and retreated into the jungle. He and the three others in his group survived for years on coconuts and bananas, occasionally stealing from the locals. They kept finding notes telling them that the war had ended, and could they please come out of there already. But they decided that all of them were a clever trick by the Allies, and that all the photographic evidence attached to the notes were Photoshopped. Of the other three, one decided to ditch them, surrendering to Filipino forces. The other two were shot, one by local police and one, ironically, by a search party. Onoda was the only one left, but he did not surrender. He did not surrender for twenty-nine years. Eventually, he was found by a college student, who persuaded him that the war was in fact over, but still. Twenty-nine years. Then he returned to Japan and wrote an autobiography.

The moral is, sometimes it's better to give up, but other times, if you don't give up, even if you fail hard you still get to write a fairly interesting autobiography. I guess that's why SCS is still alive, and we keep trying to revive it every time it dies. We're (amateur) writers in search of a story to tell, but mostly we don't know when to give up.

Would you like some ham with that cheese?